Q&A: Pamela Jones of Groklaw

Submitted by Ty on November 27, 2007 - 10:00am

Groklaw is the blog that has made a difference. Created as a personal project by Pamela Jones, better known as PJ, in 2003, its stated purpose was to increase understanding of the law as it is applied to Linux and free software.

The Groklaw website emerged just as SCO began its legal action against IBM and the Linux community, and quickly became a focus for Linux users, programmers and legal professionals in their mission to expose, understand and demystify the issues surrounding SCO's legal action.

IT PRO spoke to the site's founder, Pamela Jones about the impact of the site, the SCO case and the role Groklaw has played in the ongoing legal case.

The SCO Group's current fate can be neatly summarized by the title of PJ's very first article on the case, back in May 2003 - "SCO Falls Downstairs, Hitting its Head on Every Step." In the intervening years PJ and Groklaw can be credited with unearthing and exposing many of the flaws in SCO's case, most notably, obtaining and publishing the 1994 settlement in the USL vs BSDi case, which had been hidden from public view and played a significant role in undermining SCO's claims to the ownership of Unix. Earlier this year PJ memorably compared SCO's persistence in the face of the facts to the black knight in the Monty Python film who claimed "It's only a flesh wound".